


Patrimony

by 2ndA



Category: West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-29
Updated: 2012-02-29
Packaged: 2017-10-31 22:25:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Epigraph from ISOTG 2; quote at the end (post-graph?) by Pat Barker<br/>Unrepentant backstory ("well, I mean, he went to law  school but...you don't practice law")in response to the "celebrations"  challenge at tww_minis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patrimony

_BARTLET: He was a lawyer?  
JOSH: Yeah.  A litigator.  
BARTLET: Did he like that you were in politics?  
JOSH: I think he would've liked grandchildren more.  
BARTLET: He would've._

_  
_

***

 

Fourteen hours into studying for the first final of his second year (a seminar on advocacy in the appellate courts), Josh Lyman realizes that he went to law school for the sake of a briefcase.

He confesses this revelation to Sam over the phone, calling from the fourth floor public lounge during a study break.Sam is slogging through his own exams, younger but only a year behind because Josh took a leave-of-absence for his Fulbright.  
  
For a minute, Sam's not sure he heard correctly. “You went to Yale Law for a _briefcase_?Josh, you can _buy_ a briefcase.They’ve not just for law briefs anymore!You can carry one even if you don’t have _JD_ after your name, you know.”

“Wow—thanks for explaining that, Sam.What would I do without a native to clarify the etiquette of this strange culture?” Josh asks rhetorically. Ever since they were assigned the same tiny cubicle the previous June—Josh as a second-year summer associate, Sam as an intern—he’s enjoyed teasing the Californian about his flawless legal pedigree.It’s been years since Sam and his father talked about anything except corporate law, besides which the kid was pre-law in college (a character flaw that Josh overlooks only because Sam double-majored in English Lit, which is almost as frequently mocked as Josh’s own BA in comparative politics).

The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t want just any briefcase.The briefcase in question was the Hayte Carruthers Prize for best Law Review submission at Columbia University in 1951, physical proof that Noah Lyman, with his public school education and GI-Bill degree, had beat out the best the Ivy League could offer.

“You should come up to Lake George with me,” Sam is saying when Josh's mind returns to the conversation at hand.

“Wait…what?”

“I’m going up to Lake George next week to check on some stuff for Lisa’s aunt.Figure I’ll drive up Tuesday, come back Friday.You should come; it’ll be fun.”

“Lake George, New _York_?!   Sam—it won’t be fun; it’ll be _cold_.It’s still, like, February in upstate New York.”

“Don’t be such a wimp!Besides, Lisa says there’s a fireplace; I’ll even bring the marshmallows. And _you_ can bring those property outlines you promised me.You can study just as well up there as you can in Connecticut. We'll celebrate exam one, the beginning of the end.”

Josh likes Sam…he’s maybe the only recent acquaintance whose friendship is more than just the shared misery of law school…but, of course, Sam doesn’t know that Josh will never roast marshmallows.That Josh cannot tolerate being in a room with any open flame greater than a candle.That even the thought of having to re-ignite the pilot light on the kitchen stove gives Josh trembling, cold-sweat panic attacks at three AM.

“I, uh…I don’t know. I might have stuff to do around here.”

And Sam, weirdly intuitive even over the phone, somehow knows not to push it. “Well, think about it!The offer’s good any time up until Tuesday.”

***

Josh _doesn’t_ really think about Sam’s offer until Friday morning, when he walks into the kitchen and nearly collides with one of his housemates’ girlfriends.He and Chris and Ben share a rambling, under-furnished house that’s slowly threatening to tumble into the Quinnipiac River. (A decade later, the place will be rehabbed beyond recognition and serve as the offices for a small but venerable insurance company; in town for a New England Caucus thing, Josh will walk by it three times before recognizing it.In the early 80s, though, it’s got a leaking roof and faulty wiring, a staircase called the ‘law library’ because its landing is broad enough to hold stacks of cast off textbooks.)Besides the three law students, the building houses various come-and-go upperclassmen, a mysterious PhD student, and a revolving set of friends and camp followers.Chris’s girlfriend, Amy, however—Josh thinks she’s here to stay.

“Coffee?” Amy holds out the coffeepot and Josh grabs a mug off the dishdrainer.

Despite being ostentatiously non-domestic, Amy makes a perfect pot of coffee.Actually, she does a lot of things perfectly: Josh is secretly glad that she’s a 1L and therefore not direct competition for clerkships and law review slots.Amy and Chris, when not engaged in wall-banging sex, are in silent competition over who can strew the most notebooks or articles of clothing around the house.But somehow, she is always impeccably dressed for moot court and never without the answer when called on in class.

Josh sits down at the huge, dilapidated dining table that fills most of the kitchen—one of Ben’s contributions to the household, it looks like he boosted it from King Arthur’s court—and reaches for the sugar bowl. It’s gone, replaced by sugar cubes in an eco-friendly box, which informs him that said cubes are made from cane harvested by fair-trade labor.He glances over at Amy, but she’s disappeared behind the pages of the _Advocate._

Without ever mentioning the chipped, lidless teacup that served as a sugar bowl or the bent and perpetually damp spoon that lived in it, Amy had doubtlessly convinced Chris that the eco-friendly replacement was his idea.And that the replacement should be effected _immediately._ She’s a force of nature in a pixie haircut: being around her makes Josh want to stand up straighter and speak more clearly.Josh once overheard a 1L in the library call her a bitch, but she’s not, really.Things just move a little faster in Amy’s world, and you get the feeling that you have to speed up, too, or get left behind. The sugar bowl didn’t stand a chance.

“So, you going anywhere for spring break?” she asks, trading the metro section of the _Globe_ for his _Post_ business pages. Between the two of them, they subscribe to six daily papers, plus the Sunday _Times_.

“Gonna visit a friend of mine in New York,” Josh says, and until the words are out of his mouth he hadn’t really made up his mind.For some reason, he doesn’t want to say he has no plans.

Amy nods absently.“That’s nice. Taking the train?”

“Yeah, of course.”Josh hadn’t thought about it.

“Mmm.Hey, have you been following this thing on the SEC?”

***

He _does_ take the train, fills his backpack with winter clothes, the outlines, a casebook for his next exam, and finds himself eyeing the briefcase of the commuter next to him. He gets off at the Harlem/125 th Street station and hails a taxi to take him to the address Sam gave him over the phone.

It’s Lisa’s stepmother’s apartment, or maybe her stepfather’s sister’s—Josh doesn’t know how Sam keeps his girlfriend’s whole broken and blended family straight.Somehow, though, they all seem to have Sam on speed-dial for little chores like checking the pipes in the summer house in Lake George.Lisa’s studying communications out at Berkeley; her _family_ probably sees more of Sam that she does. Doesn’t seem like the ideal foundation for a relationship, but it’s not like Josh has done any better himself, so he figures he should just keep his mouth shut.

Josh is not terribly familiar with New York, nothing beyond field-trips in high school and a few summer internships in college, but he looks out the cab window and realizes with a start that he’s about three blocks from Columbia.Home of the Hayden-Carruthers Prize and the associated briefcase.

He can picture that briefcase, when he closes his eyes, as clearly as he can imagine his father’s face.He can picture the worn corners and the tarnished clasp and the way one handle has been carefully, almost seamlessly repaired by a shoemaker under the El on Dykeman Street before Josh was even born. His father, who started college borrowing textbooks from the library and transporting them in a paper grocery sack, has carried that briefcase every day of his working life.Which is to say, nearly every day since the Columbia commencement exercises of 1951.He keeps it stuffed to overflowing with files, legal pads, wintergreen mints, a certain kind of pen.Mom has been after him for years to replace it with something smaller, sleeker, maybe something with wheels.

“Noah, my goodness, you don’t need to bring the kitchen sink!” she had said at least twice a week when Josh was growing up.And Dad would tap his forehead, “ _Omnia mea meacum porto,_ ” he would reply with a wink at Josh. The first child to spit out the translation got first dibs on whatever small presents he’d brought home from the city—first this city, New York City, and later Hartford.There was a special pocket reserved for these little gifts; Josh wonders what purpose that pocket serves now.

The cab suddenly swerves and stops with a jolt as someone darts in front of it. Josh’s head smacks against the window frame

“Fucking _hippie_ ,” the cabbie yells.

The hippie in question—a teenager with a big banner on a stick—turns and yells something back, but it is lost in the sudden, swarming crowd.

More banners, more signs.People chanting slogans and waving placards and beating tribal-looking drums. The crowd swells and parts, revealing a dozen people in gloriously colored robes, like an unexpected flock of bright birds.

“What’s going on?”Josh asks.

“Who the fuck knows?”The cabbie throws up his hands in exasperation—he can’t go anywhere without running over a group singing _We Shall Overcome._ “Fucking protesters.”

All traffic has come to a halt.A dozen children in t-shirts emblazed with pictures of Martin Luther King scramble through the marchers.Josh cranes his head to read the signs going by. _STOP THE MASSACRES!!_ _Africa_ _for ALL AFRICANS! Peace = Justice!!Righteousness Like a Mighty Stream._ _Liberty_ _and Justice FOR ALL._

He rolls down his window.“What’s going on?” he asks a woman in a tie-dyed t-shirt when the press of the crowd washes her close enough to hear him.“What are you doing?”

“We’re rallying to protest the racist regime in South Africa.” She looks at him curiously.  She's gorgeous, her skin a glowing blue black so smooth that he wants to touch it. “What are _you_ doing?”

Ahead, a clot of protesters breaks through the traffic, and the crowd surges forward.A new wave (“…when do we want it?”—“Now!”) pours down a cross-street and the girl is caught up and swept away, feverishly waving her placard.

“Keep the change,” Josh says, stuffing bills across the partition into the driver’s hand.He swings his backpack onto his shoulder and the pull of the crowd seems to suck him right out of the taxi and sweep him down the street like an irresistible human current. He can hear the cab driver shouting something behind him, but he can’t make out the words so he just turns and waves—a gleeful, semaphore, two-armed wave that sends him crashing into a group of folks walking with a long banner. _The Purple Shall Reign_ , says the banner, which looks like it may have been a bedsheet before it was reincarnated and joined the revolution.Josh has no idea what that means.He grabs a fistful of cotton anyway and finds himself reeled into the crowd.

The route for a march to protest South African Apartheid ran into a sit-in to commemorate the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination, and both groups got to talking.And then they got to singing.And in South Africa, the police used water cannons with purple dye to mark protesters for later apprehension.All of this is relayed to Josh in between chants and speeches and verses of _I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore_.Josh _is_ marching, though, and shouting, and singing along whenever they get to a verse he knows. Somehow, it isn’t a mournful procession at all—more like a block party, a celebration, a parade.It’s exhilarating, hollering for peace and justice on a rainy April morning in New York: he’s just worked himself up to truly righteous outrage when the cops show up and calmly start arresting folks.So that’s how he ends up in a holding cell in Morningside Heights when he’s supposed to be in the Adirondacks, where an Iroquois god at the beginning of time pressed his hand into the Earth to create the Finger Lakes.

***

There aren’t that many protesters—a little over a hundred people, milling around in front of the intake desk, accidentally jabbing each other with pickets and arguing over colonialism’s effects on indigenous farming in the former Rhodesia or something.The beleaguered cops try to divvy them up for arraignment.   
  
"Everybody protesting South Africa, stand over here,” one cop shouts.   
  
“Protesting the racist national policies of the illegitimate government that purports to represent South Africans?” a protester clarifies.   
  
“Yeah.That,”  the cop says, and the protester wanders over peaceably enough.Josh tries to catch the attention of anyone in a uniform, but it’s gonna take _hours_ even to get his one phone call through to Sam _._

He ends up in the drunk tank with a few other guys about his age, apparently because none of them have particularly close ties to either the Martin Luther King, Jr. group or the anti-Apartheid group.They all know each other from classes at City College: James, Berto, Dee, and some guys whose names Josh doesn’t catch.They had signed on as a favor to someone’s roommate’s ex-girlfriend, who was with the anti-Apartheid group.(This, Josh will learn, is how things are done in the scattershot world of grassroots activism: you come to my protest, and I’ll sign your petition; you have your people send postcards to this councilman, and I’ll have my people join your boycott. I’ll trade what I can to save what I have to: anything to swell the ranks, to create the illusion of mass support.It’s exactly how things are done in Congress, too).

“How about you?” one of them—James?—asks, mostly to change the conversation before his friends can start taking bets on how unlikely it is that Diana, the Apartheid activist, will ever sleep with him again.

“Right time, right place.Or, you know. Not.” Josh shrugs, “I came down from Connecticut to meet a friend. I’m in school up there, in Connecticut, I mean.”He gives his bookbag a little kick. “Law school.”

Berto whistles between his teeth: “Ooo, law school.Like that Perry Mason shit? You gonna get us off, counselor, sir?” he teases.

Josh shrugs again.He’s heard his fair share of lawyer jokes; the best defense is absolutely none.

“What d’you think of reparations?”asks Dee suddenly.

Josh turns to look at the guy whose been watching sullenly from the corner as his fellow travelers explained their situation. “What?”

“Reparations.What’s your _legal opinion_?”

“Reparations...for what war?”

Dee snorts.“Reparations for _slavery_ ,” and he doesn’t actually add _you moron_ , but Josh can hear it anyway.

“Oh.Well.I—uh,” Josh can practically feel his pasty white, New-England-winter skin glowing under the fluorescent lights. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Course not; you wouldn’t’ve, would you?”Dee elbows James.“That’s privilege, man.Right there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”Josh can’t figure out how they went from talking about James’s ex-girlfriend, the anti-Apartheid girl, to arguing over what the US owes its African-American citizens for generations of chattel slavery.He wonders if there’s any way to talk about the Knicks instead.

“Means what it says.”Dee glares at him.“You don’t have to think about how this country got its wealth.And that’s a privilege not everybody has.”

“Look, reparations are a nice idea in _theory_.But it’s not like…Jesus, the United States of America isn’t Volkswagen!”Josh scrambles to remember a few footnotes from his history of property class. Race is right up there with politics and religion as conversational topics that never make you look good. He wants to go back to teasing James about his girlfriend.“How are we supposed to determine who gets what?”he says in his most reasonable tone.“I mean, there _are_ no surviving slaves.There’s no way to reliably track their descendents.And…and, the statute of limitations probably expired in the last century!”

Dee stares at him calmly.“ _Property records_ are better than you think, schoolboy.How much tracking do you need? I can promise you, man, I didn’t come over on no _Mayflower_.”James and Berto snicker at that, but Dee doesn’t crack a smile. “First permanent settlement was…what, sixteen-hundred-something?Civil War ends 1865.That’s more than two hundred years of forced labor,” Dee says flatly, “which doesn’t even count, like, mental anguish and loss of future earnings and other stuff people sue for nowadays.”

“The interest payments alone would bankrupt the federal government!”Josh yelps.“What good would that do?”

Dee shrugs.“Not my government, not my problem.”

“And what about Native Americans? Wouldn’t they deserve something, too?I mean, if you want reparations for _one_ minority group, you’d have to allow them for every group.”

“Sure.”Dee doesn’t seem at all fazed by the implications of this.“But the government's paid out to some Indian tribes, some of those Japanese-Americans held in camps during the war. Slave labor fucking _paid_ for the Revolution.No cotton, no tobacco?No allies against the British.But the war for Independence didn’t mean independence for everybody, now did it?”

“I didn’t mean—”

Dee cuts him off.“And all that industrializing up in New England—cotton mills and whatnot.Where do you think the cotton came from?”

Josh realizes that he’s pacing, hands clenched into fists, while Dee sprawls on one of the room’s rickety benches and watches with barely concealed amusement.The other guys are glancing back and forth like they’re at a tennis match.Josh forces himself to sit down. It’s just…he hates, hates, _hates_ to lose an argument.

“You should be a lawyer,” he says lightly: a joke, a concession.Dee's won this round: checkmate and all that.

Dee snorts.“You shouldn’t.”

Josh takes a deep breath, then another.His father always says that you don’t win a case by making your argument; you win by destroying your opponent’s.“Seventy seven years,” he says finally.

Dee raises an eyebrow.

“Technically, seventy five, if you want to factor in the Emancipation Proclamation—but, whatever, let’s simplify things: from the founding of the current American Republic to the passage of the 13th Amendment.That’s seventy seven years.The rest of the time, slaves were held under colonial governments or the Articles of Confederation, so you’ll have to sue Spain or France or England.And considering how many times the French have changed governments since then…well, good luck with that.”

“Lot of work got done in seventy seven years,” Dee observes. “None of it paid for.” But he’s sitting up now.

“Well, _I_ won’t be paying anything.My family wasn’t around.Maybe we benefited from being white in America—but we never made any money from slaves, because we didn’t have any. And my friend, Sam, he had a great-great-great-great uncle or something, fought for the Union, killed at Antietam.So he probably gets a pass...I mean, being a descendant should work both ways.Otherwise, it’s just racist, right?”  
  
What he really wants to say is that, more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation started outlawing chattel slavery, it's time to stop asking how much human beings are worth.  But he doesn't know how to say that.  


Dee opens his mouth, but Josh cuts him off.“When did your family get here?”he asks Berto.

“Uh.”The guy looks surprised to be called out. “I don’t know.”

“Better find out,” Josh advises.“We’ll have to pick dates, of course.1492?1618?1808?We may need a sliding scale, too.House slaves, field slaves.Descendants of freed slaves should probably get a discount:less suffering, you know.And we need a base price, anyway.”He leans back against the plexi-glass wall of their holding cell.“Whaddaya say, gentlemen?Put a price tag on it for me. What’s freedom worth anyway?”  


“Nope, you'll never be a lawyer,” says one of the guys, one whose name Josh didn't even register.  “But talk like that, you could go into government.  Or be a TV preacher.”

Feeling a little ridiculous, Josh drops down onto a bench and starts picking at the ugly orange naugahyde.

***

They end up spending the night in the holding area because the precinct runs out of cells and there’d be too much paperwork involved in sending them down to central booking and intake. It’s…awkward, to say the least.Other groups of protesters make a party of it, singing protest songs and generally celebrating their incarceration.Josh doesn’t feel much like celebrating.While his cellmates sleep, limbs falling off the benches, Josh stares at the peeling ceiling. He wishes he had the con-law textbook he’d packed to read on the train, but the wardens had confiscated his backpack when they brought in the dinner trays.He works out a complicated defense of public protest based on precedents going back to the Boston Tea Party.Secretly, he suspects that Dee is right: he’ll never be a lawyer.

He will also, it turns out, never get to unleash his rhetoric on the city circuit court judge.The protesters are herded into a courtroom in groups of ten early the next morning by staff eager to get them out of the way before the day’s _real_ work begins. It becomes evident that the arrests were made more to clear the streets before rush hour, and that the trials will be conducted in the same spirit: to clear the holding cells.The harried judge sweeps in, carrying a legal pad in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other ( _We are pleased to serve you!_ the cup says).He barely looks at Josh and his nine codefendents, charges them with obstruction of a public thoroughfare and marching without a permit, sentences them all to one night in prison.A weary-looking public defender—Josh realizes with a start that the woman is defending _him,_ that this woman whom he’s never met is his fulfilling his Constitutional right to counsel _—_ waves from the front of the court. “No malice,” she calls, and she and the judge have clearly been through this routine before, because she doesn’t even have to elaborate.The Right Honorable Judge Maplethorpe shrugs, agrees to count time served, and tells all ten that they are free to go:“Next time you decide to fix the world, go file a request at City Hall, save us all some trouble.Bailiff, bring in the next set.”

Josh and the rest of the criminal element are led back through the holding area, where their property is returned to them.Most of the protesters just get a manila envelope (keys, watch, wallet); there’s a half-hearted flurry of activity when Josh’s bookbag can’t be matched to its property slip.It’s eventually discovered behind some abandoned placards, but by the time Josh has signed for it, the rest of the protesters have dispersed.No James, no Bel, no Berto, certainly no Dee—he doesn’t know why, but he half expected to find them waiting for him out on the sidewalk.But why would they hang around for him?It's not like they're _friends._ They probably live nearby, maybe have jobs to go to, classes to attend.And Josh has a backpack of clothing, a book on the Constitution, two-thirds of a law degree. _I carry with me all my things,_ he tells himself, and then shrugs on his backpack and sets off for Sam’s girlfriend’s stepmother’s house. 

 ***

Years later, in the back of an empty VFW hall in Tupelo, Mandy challenges the rest of the Bartlett for America senior staff to a game of I Never and then promptly passes out during—well, Josh figures it’s maybe the eighth round.Or the tenth.One of those even numbers. They’ve been playing for a while, anyway, working their way through the mismatched case of liquor the caterers left behind after the fundraising dinner.It’s late—they should go back to the hotel. Josh can't even remember what they're celebrating.  


“I never...flirted with a member of the press,” Toby says slyly, looking straight at CJ, who huffs and drinks two fingers of the cheap wine in her plastic cup.Sam and Donna do the same.Josh blearily hopes Mandy doesn’t drool on his backpack, which she’s using for a pillow.He kind of wants to steal it for himself. (That backpack, a descendant of the one he hauled through law school, kind of became his mascot while he wasn't looking.  He can't quite bring himself to carry a briefcase).  Maybe he'll just rest his head for a moment while he tries to remember the good advice someone once gave him about mixing grape and grain…wait.Wait—Donna? And the press?  Did _Donna_ just…

“Technically, the member of the press flirted with _me_ ,” Sam adjusts his glasses, speaking with the ponderous enunciation of someone trying hard not to slur his words.“I think. I was just being polite.”

“I never _got myself arrested_ ,” CJ shoots back, and really, Josh thinks, she should _totally_ be drunker than she is. She should be too drunk to scheme.Scheme is a funny word.Hard to say it right when you’ve had as much to drink as he’s had tonight. Toby grumbles— _never arrested? you’re clearly not doing this politics thing right_ —but dutifully throws back the contents of his cup.Josh does the same, and things are fuzzy enough that it takes a moment before he realizes the rest of the table is staring at him.

“Why, Joshua!I’m shocked!” CJ put a hand to her forehead and flutters her eyes like a damsel in distress.“Tobias—Toby, Toby, Toby…not so much.”

“I take the Fifth,” the Communications Director says primly.

“Once, I didn’t pay a parking ticket for three months,” Margaret chimes in sympathetically from her end of the table. “I still don’t think it was my fault.The zone was badly marked.”

Sam and Donna are still looking inquisitive—Sam is blinking owlishly and Donna is clearly biting her tongue and reminding herself that it’s none of her business. Josh can’t remember what he told Sam about his little sojourn in the slammer: _missed the train, got lost, crazy protesters held up traffic_.He waves his plastic cup dismissively.“There was a, you know, a celebration.When I was in law school.It got out of hand.”He knows they’re imagining some kind of fraternity kegger, the cops called over a noise violation.He doesn’t correct them.

 

_{Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here there.  These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll like about in the language like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them will take your hand off}_


End file.
